President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried on Friday to put the best face on evident tensions created by Obama’s remarks a day earlier, when the president outlined his vision for an eventual peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Obviously, there are some differences between us in the precise forumlations and language, and that’s going to happen between friends,” Obama said after a 96-minute-long, one-on-one meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “But what we are in complete accord about is a true peace can only occur if the ultimate resolution allows Israel to defend itself against threats.”

When cameras and reporters were escorted in after the meeting, Netanyahu was polite to his U.S. host but also bluntly pushed back against Obama’s Thursday speech. In that address, Obama said Israel’s pre-1967 borders should be the basis for negotiating a settlement to the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We can’t go back to those indefensible lines,” Netanyahu said, noting that the borders before the Six Day War left Israel just nine miles wide at its narrowest point. That distance, the Israeli prime minister noted, is “half the width of the Washington Beltway.

Each leader paid close attention but evinced little reaction as his counterpart spoke.

Netanyahu seemed to choose his words carefully as he called Obama’s speech “important” but stopped short of characterizing it as welcome or helpful. “I think we may have differences here and there, but I think there’s an overall direction that we wish to work together to pursue a real genuine peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbor,” he said.

In a message clearly aimed at the U.S. audience, Netanyahu also referred to Hamas as “the Palestinian version of Al Qaeda.” Just last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cut a power-sharing deal with Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip, has committed repeated acts of terrorism and is dedicated to wiping out Israel. In addition, Abbas is pressing forward with a plan to ask the United Nations to formally recognize a Palestinian state in September.

Netanyahu complained about Obama’s proposal that Israel eventually withdraw all troops from the territory of a new Palestinian state. “We have to have a long-term military presence along the Jordan” River, he said.

He also suggested that Obama should have been more direct with the Palestinians about a concession many experts say they will need to make to achieve peace: give up the claimed right of Palestinian families to return to their former homes in territory Israel would control in a peace deal.

“Everybody knows that not going to happen, and I think it’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it’s not going to happen,” the Israeli prime minister said as he sat next to Obama.

Friday’s meeting bore similarities to a chilly interaction between Obama and Netanyahu that took place in March 2010. At that time, tensions over Israel’s refusal to suspend settlement activities led to a White House encounter the Israelis reportedly viewed as a snub and an insult to the Israeli prime minister and his delegation.

During the public portion of the meeting Friday, Obama did not repeat his comments about the 1967 borders. However, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that Obama stood by the position he articulated Thursday and that he discussed the issue privately with Netanyahu.

Carney added that Obama’s reference to the 1967 lines was consistent with what diplomats have discussed for years as the basic framework for a peace accord.

“That is a formulation that has been understood by parties to these negotiators and by anybody who’s been a close observer of these negtoations in the region for years,” Carney told reporters. “It’s not some radical departure from where we’ve been and where the parties have been.”

The press secretary also expressed frustration with reports that Obama had told Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders. Some of those accounts did not note that he also called for “mutually-agreed swaps.”

“There’s this crazy mischaracterization of what we’re talking about here,” said Carney.

After Obama’s speech, several of his 2012 rivals, including former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), and some Republican lawmakers came out strongly against the president’s outlines of a peace plan.

Yet the most prominent pro-Israel group in the U.S. remained officially silent. A spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said the group is still studying the president’s remarks. Obama plans to address AIPAC on Sunday; Netanyahu is to follow Monday and then speak to Congress on Tuesday.

Despite the outrage they elicited, Obama’s comments Thursday were not very different from remarks President George W. Bush made in 2005 suggesting that the “1949 armistice lines” — in essence, Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries — be the starting point for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Bush, however, sent Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a letter in 2004 declaring it “unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return” to the pre-1967 borders. The Obama administration has declined to reaffirm the text of the letter, but Carney said Obama’s position was consistent with the language Bush used on the border issue.

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday after his speech, Obama called the framework he laid out for an Israeli-Palestinian peace “obvious.”

“The basis for negotiations will involve looking at that 1967 border, recognizing that conditions on the ground have changed, and there are going to need to be swaps to accommodate the interests of both sides,” Obama said.

Some critics said it was not so much the content of Obama’s remarks as their timing that made them needlessly provocative toward Israel. The high-profile speech, just before Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, called attention to the peace process and pressured Israel to return to the bargaining table despite what many Israelis view as threatening and dangerous Palestinian actions.

Obama said in his speech that Israel should not have to negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence and accepts Israel’s right to exist. He also suggested that Abbas’s U.N. plan is misguided and won’t lead to a viable Palestinian state. But those statements didn’t mollify critics.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu’s comments were tantamount to “his total rejection of the Obama vision and speech,” the Associated Press reported. “Without Mr. Netanyahu committing to two states on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps, he is not a partner to the peace process,” Erekat said.